Pioneering carbon credits project emerges in Tsabong
Mbongeni Mguni | Monday September 18, 2023 06:00
BusinessWeek has established that Gazelle Ecosolutions, a tech and environment firm with global founding partners, has finalised a proof of concept at the Tsabong project site which demonstrates that the carbon credits can be put on the global market.
A carbon credit or offset credit is a transferrable financial instrument (i.e. a derivative of an underlying commodity) certified by governments or independent certification bodies to represent an emission reduction that can then be bought or sold.
Companies can meet their climate targets by purchasing credits for their current emissions while other organizations have cut the bulk of their emissions and used credits to compensate for those they cannot avoid.
Essentially, companies that can’t stop emitting carbon dioxide can ask another entity elsewhere in the world to emit less so that, even as the first carries on producing carbon dioxide, the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere is reduced.
Gazelle co-founder and chief scientist, Thoralf Meyer, told BusinessWeek following years of research, the Tsabong project was ready to be offered up in the global carbon market.
“This project follows something called a non-conversion project,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Conference on Agriculture and Food Security. “Essentially, it is not converting an existing natural or semi-natural area into a different type of land use. “Typical for this area would be intensified livestock production area with all its consequences like over-grazing, intrusion into wildlife areas and others. “We can essentially highlight the difference between a completely over-grazed communal area and a functional savannah eco-system and that difference is the carbon that can be sold.”
Meyer explained that the community in the area where the project is located where being assisted to change their approach on how they keep livestock and to adopt environmentally sustainable farming methods.
“There is less environmental degradation and the lower production of the livestock can be compensated for by the sale of carbon credits,” he said. “So now we have better environmental quality and potentially higher income than we have had before.”
He added: “Can we use carbon to essentially minimise environmental damage but also compensate and essentially uplift people in these communities so that eventually they don’t depend so much on government? “There are other questions associated with that like how will this money will be distributed? “We have made mistakes before and if we acknowledge those and do it better, then we may have a chance.”
Meyer said while the Tsabong project had been packaged and was ready for offer into the global carbon market, the ongoing debates over methodology and certification systems would mean delays. Global civic groups, governments and organisations such as the United Nations are tightening the carbon credits system as numerous studies and exposes by media have shown a pattern of greenwashing by major companies, or falsely portraying a commitment to reducing emissions or moving towards carbon neutrality.
Meyer said Gazelle was also looking at establishing similar projects in Kgalagadi District.
“These methods have just been released, the new ones, and we were waiting for them so that we know what we need to go and measure once we set foot onto people’s ranches,” he told BusinessWeek.